The hardware vendor info or serial number can be very helpful to open a support case for Linux admins. We will cover this topic today to get this info from Linux system. We will use dmidecode command to get this info. The following examples show us three different platforms, physical servers, VMware VM and Openstack instance. This command is safe to run without changing anything.
Table of Contents
What is dmidecode?
Dmidecode is a tool which reads a computer’s DMI (stands for Desktop Management Interface) (some say SMBIOS – stands for System Management BIOS) table contents and display system hardware information in a human-readable format.
How to get hardware vendor info on Linux?
# dmidecode –type system
dmidecode 3.2
Getting SMBIOS data from sysfs.
SMBIOS 2.5 present.
Handle 0x0002, DMI type 1, 27 bytes
System Information
Manufacturer: Cisco Systems Inc <<<< Hardware vendor
Product Name: R200-1120402W <<<< Model name
Version: 0
Serial Number: QCI1544A4BK . <<<< Serial Number
UUID: 3d2b1a67-04cc-11e1-bd1d-70ca9bce67aa
Wake-up Type: Other
SKU Number: Not Specified
Family: Not Specified
How to check if the host is a VMware VM?
# dmidecode –type system
dmidecode 3.1
Getting SMBIOS data from sysfs.
SMBIOS 2.4 present.
Handle 0x0001, DMI type 1, 27 bytes
System Information
Manufacturer: VMware, Inc. <<<< VMware
Product Name: VMware Virtual Platform . <<<< VMware
Version: None
Serial Number: VMware-42 01 e6 2f 61 2e 26 a4-1a 75 22 6e e2 63 ff f1
UUID: 4201e62f-612e-26a4-1a75-226ee263fff1
Wake-up Type: Power Switch
SKU Number: Not Specified
Family: Not Specified
How to check if the host is an Openstack instance?
# dmidecode –type system
dmidecode 3.1
Getting SMBIOS data from sysfs.
SMBIOS 2.8 present.
Handle 0x0100, DMI type 1, 27 bytes
System Information
Manufacturer: OCP <<<< Openstack
Product Name: OpenStack Compute . <<<< Openstack
Version: 14.0.3-9.el7
Serial Number: 4b0af307-b601-4140-9fb6-d63dcf0b5b12
UUID: 956f8b56-86de-4c92-8259-7268c9ce0b85
Wake-up Type: Power Switch
SKU Number: Not Specified
Family: Virtual Machine
Handle 0x2000, DMI type 32, 11 bytes
System Boot Information
Status: No errors detected